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A Year in Dance Music: 10 of 2014's Most Significant Moments

What a year in clubland it’s been...  EDM has risen and risen whilst the underground explores fresh sonic fusions, returns melodies stage-centre and, in some quarters, tests radical new levels of industry independence.  There have been unusual collaborations, everything from cult techno acts warming up for global pop stars to radically different Ibiza club nights joining forces in the interest of brand (conversely) and financial security.  Some major club nights have actually fallen, exciting new artists have soared, dance legends, sadly, have passed on and technology, quite recently in fact, has output unprecedented evolution promising truly game-changing developments in 2015.

Here are 10 of the most massively significant moments for the electric dance scene this year:

Surgeon warms up for Lady Gaga

The title says it all really. Last month, techno grandee Surgeon warmed up the crowd for the Birmingham leg of Lady Gaga’s artRAVE world tour.  Surgeon played alongside Gaga’s regular warm-up Lady Starlight, delivering mainstream pop lovers a healthy dose of crunching, no-nonsense techno.

Starlight, a fan of Surgeon, had heard one of his local Birmingham sets previously and proceeded to shout him out during a Gaga gig in the same city. Surgeon was in the crowd, visited Starlight back stage later and was subsequently invited to join her for Gaga’s next Midlands concert.  So impressed was Gaga by the pair’s chemistry that Surgeon was promptly invited back to warm-up in Paris as well.

Gaga tweeted from Paris:  “Lady Starlight and Surgeon are murdering it with some purely live techno!” – evidently pleased. And Starlight and Surgeon have already found time to experiment further in the studio.  The latter doesn’t expect an epochal pop-techno revolution (Starlight regularly plays techno on Gaga’s tour dates) but concedes his unlikely collaboration has probably opened the genre to a far wider audience than can ever have been expected – and who knows where that will lead?

New Aphex Twin album

The ‘Twin’, AKA Richard D James, was back after a whopping 13 years – his emphatic comeback album Syro dazzling critics and addicts alike, and reminding the electronic scene of one of its biggest, most crazy ‘n’ creative talents.

Syro, released via Warp Records (naturally), offered us a thrilling glimpse of electronic music’s future, wielding everything from abrasive acid to hushaby melody but in a manner unlike anything heard before.  The Guardian described it as ‘on a completely different planet to almost anything else that’s been released over the last decade and a half.”

There were other grand (and successful returns).  Plastikman, Richie Hawtin’s hallowed alias, presented new album EX some 11 years after last opus Closer.  In truth, EX was based on Hawtin’s live appearance at Guggenheim’s International Gala (in 2013) but the material was fresh and a reassertion of Plastikman’s minimal, tech , synth-scaped genius.

PC Music has landed

2014 has seen A G Cook’s label (label in the loosest sense) run riot over the dance music industry’s established processes and conventions.  PC Music doesn’t even sell its wares, streaming them instead via a Soundcloud account linked to a dedicated website.  The music too (like that of closely aligned producer SOPHIE) has become a seismic talking point – inflated pop-dance nodding to the Japanese concept of kawaii (cuteness) with a jaw-dropping sweep of ballsy synths, grime b-lines and happy hardcore ‘chipmunk’ vocals.

PC Music massively expanded its audience earlier this year with QT’s single ‘Hey QT’, produced by Cook and SOPHIE.  The label’s other emerging artists included Hannah Diamonds and Princess Bambi.  Some have derided Cook’s set-up as overly sickly but there are other influencers in keen support – FACT Magazine has labelled PC Music’s output as ‘the most compelling pop music in recent memory’.  Resident Advisor has PC Music as one of its Top 20 labels of the year; FACT has it in its label Top 10.

Whether you like its tunes or not, PC Music is significant as part of 2014’s wider ‘online underground’ revolution – operating beyond record stores, and even digital ones, this apparent scene avoids the traditional channels of distribution, PR and promotion, expanding instead through Bandcamp, Soundcloud and lo-fi streaming portals like SPF420.  Community and zany creativity are the scene’s twin pillars – everything else just fades to black.

Vinyl renaissance

The writing was, rather fantastically, on the wall back in January, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) reporting the highest vinyl sales in 15 years.  That, of course, was for 2013, but 2014 usurped that with Official Charts talking up £20m revenues from vinyl this year as “an incredible turnaround from barely £3m just five years ago.”  Heritage rock acts and dance supremacists alike helped rack up one million record sales by the end of November – the figure could climb by another 200,000 come 31 December.

It follows, that record stores have also had a better year.  The signs for what many thought was a dying institution, look promising.  In London alone, a number of new premises opened for business this year, including Rye Wax, Do!! You!!, Yam and Dalston’s Love Vinyl – all are starting to make their presence felt, musically and socially.

Enter KUVO

Pioneer’s bold app ‘n’ web platform, KUVO, officially launched in October and, immediately, ripples were felt right across clubland. The innovation, plugged in to a club’s CDJs and mixer, delivers real-time information on what tracks DJs are playing.  Great, on the one hand, for struggling artists and labels - KUVO’s digital cataloguing will potentially plug the calculated £100m black hole in terms of lost or misallocated performance royalties for dance producers.  Worrying, on the other, dance purists claiming that yet more of the dancefloor’s original magic and mystery is set to be lost – clubbers lost in their smartphone KUVO updates, rather than the actual music....

KUVO could fundamentally change the dance music landscape in the coming years.

Seven Davis Jr makes Friends....

Seven smashed it this year.  He absolutely smashed it.  2013’s debut EP ‘One’ was eventually flagged to Luke Solomon at Classic who in August released Davis Jr’s next EP outing, ‘Friends’.  The title track blended the finest elements of nu-house, gospel and 21^st century blues ‘n’ soul.  Its B-Side companion, meanwhile, spliced New vocal Jersey garage, jumpin’ funk and various other engaging shuffles and wobbles.  The fusionism was exemplary, enhancing Davis Jr’s soulfulness rather than diminishing it.  The public agreed, sales flying.  The media agreed too, ‘Friends’ already pride of place in a variety of prominent ‘best 2014 track’ countdowns, including those for DJ Magazine, XLR8R, Beatport and Gilles Peterson.

Davis Jr’s achievements in 2014, also including colourful releases on Apron (not least ‘P.A.R.T.Y’, a joyous splice of soulful sleaze and black box freak out), Ten Thousand Yen and The Love Below, are all the more impressive considering his prior 15-year struggle with artistic rejection and health issues.  An expectedly diverse album is due next year, and new house-angled EPs with Classic....

Other artists making particularly staggering impressions in 2014 included Portsmouth deep-house talent Leon Vynehall and Lithuania’s Marijus Adomaitis – the latter well-known as Mario Basanov and as part of Mario & Vidis, but now a surprising mainstream titan via alias Ten Walls.

Gatecrasher Crashes...

Gatecrasher’s spectacular demise in Ibiza over the summer reminded us of the underlying financial fragility permeating much of clubland still – years after the global recessionary peaks of the late Noughties.  Gatecrasher’s owners announced early 2014 that a new Ibiza club (formerly Eden) was to open; this off the back of several messy monetary entanglements the preceding months.  Said venue arrived in May but soon after promoters and artists were cancelling residencies. Gatecrasher (with its Birmingham branch still open) issued a defiant statement saying that it would be better placed in 2015 but, effectively, its Ibiza dream was over.

By contrast, Sankeys Ibiza had embraced a ‘back to raw’ warehouse vibe and cheaper door entry – Sankeys, another of clubland’s major brands, seemed on a different trajectory to Gatecrasher in terms of the White Isle. However, whilst David Vincent’s Ibiza adventure more than delivered, his two key ventures in the US would flounder. This autumn, both Sankeys Manhattan and Brooklyn folded. Of the latter, Vincent claimed that that club’s franchisee had “failed to deliver on any of the agreed terms…we soon found ourselves in an untenable position being both unsupported financially and operationally.”

Many sections of the electronic dance music scene may be booming today but Gatecrasher and Sankeys are stark reflections of a bust scenario that always lurks just round the corner – our scene is still, in so many ways, a turbulent place to make music and do business.

Glitterbox

In June, Defected’s bold new Saturday night at Booom Ibiza was faced with lower than hoped for numbers - the distraction of a World Cup and Ibiza’s general set-up around homogenized, tech-house-focused clubs largely to blame. But things soon changed.

Over the summer, revellers started to embrace Glitterbox’s fresh approach to the White Isle dancefloor and spread the word – the night’s timeless, unashamed celebration of soulful house and classic disco appealed to all bases of clubland, drawing out many of the island’s most colourful and influential characters. Fuelled by residents including Joey Negro, Dimitri From Paris and Late Nite Tuff Guy, as well as special guests David Morales, Hercules & Love Affair and Mousse T, Glitterbox has spectacularly asserted itself into the Balearic psyche come ‘closing party’ late September.

Reviews from a host of key commentators including Essential Ibiza and Reisdent Advisor more than backed this up. Glitterbox was another notable reference point in 2014 for the growing renaissance of vocal and melodic dance music.

Calvin Harris tops Forbes

Forbes’ annual report on the wealthiest DJs, the Electronic Cash King List, has become something of an institution these days. Last year, Calvin Harris (who recently released new album ‘Motion’) dominated with a purported $46m (£29.3m) in yearly earnings. Incredibly, this year’s list saw that total rocket further to $66m (£42m). Harris, still in the top spot, was followed by the likes of David Guetta ($30m, £19.1m), Tiesto ($28m, £17.8m) and Avicii ($28m, £17.8m).

Overall, Forbes’ Top 10 DJs racked up a whopping $268m (£171m) in earnings in 2014, 11% more than 2013. The Top 10 were almost exclusively EDM too, reflecting the relentless rise and rise of that movement in clubland (and now wider culture) over the past 12 months. Astonishing.

Frankie Knuckles RIP

Millions of words have been written since the sad passing of house godfather Frankie Knuckles back in March but none get anywhere close to conveying the unique brilliance of the man, artist and history-maker. None of us saw it coming and it hurt like hell…still hurts…when it did.

Knuckles was 59 when he died 31 March, 2014 from complications around Type 2 diabetes. Long-term Def Mix partner David Morales confirmed the news via social media and fans, peers and media outlets all over the world united in grief but also in praise of the unsurpassable legacy Knuckles had left the entire electronic scene. That, in turn, President of the United States Barack Obama published his own condolences illustrates the scale of the DJ-producer’s achievements – transcending the traditional nocturnal environs of club culture and offering something far more significant to our society…something far more powerful than simply danceable beats.

Frankie Knuckles, you will always be missed…

Words: Ben Lovett